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Huxley's Crome Yellow (1922) is an interwar (seemingly existentialist) novel which takes place in a rural British estate. It includes Huxley's interesting critique of eugenics, which was more fleshed out in Brave New World (1932). But Crome it is written as a post-Victorian drama of manners instead of a futuristic dystopia. The book is kind of pointless and meandering--by design. It comes to an unsatisfying end and it appears none of the characters have really changed through the course of the story. The whole thing reads as unromantic and perfunctory. Which is how Huxley understands modern (and post-modern) sexual relations. This industrial vision of procreation evolves into the test tube reproductive regime of Huxley's dystopian magnum opus ten years later.
Some Crome's eugenics themes are both funny and tragic. The story about two dwarfs madly in love who have a typical sized child that leads them to mutual suicide is reminiscent of the best Vonnegut stories (like the Cat's Cradle (1963) dwarf)--hilarious, humanizing and maudlin. Huxley is subtle in his explorations of eugenics within British society. It is almost an imperceptible current among the rest of the subplots of the Crome. That is until the end of the story, when one of the three sisters rebuffs a suitor's romantic advances by talking about the Malthusian League. These sisters are stuck in Crome with suitors that they are not romantically interested in--by ritual the men are forced to shuck and jive and the women are forced to watch while both sexes would rather be unbothered by intrusions on their reading, eating or wandering in nature. Even the overtly romantic character in the story--a traveling bard--is unspecific in his advances, relishing in the chase and uninterested in settling who disappears to another estate half way through the story. After he is gone and courting another woman, one of the sisters realizes she was interested all along. The role of romance in this story is be unrequited.
The main character, Denis, is a romantic who fails at courting, poet who nobody reads who references books that nobody has read. After he has the only moment of catharsis in the whole book--and winds up on a tower thinking about jumping off--he is snatched back by one of the sisters to his previous position of stupefying impotence and unwillingly shuffled off onto a train back to London where he he will regret his time at Crome. Without understanding this to be a frustrating allegory for industrial age procreation this icky and unsatisfying. The romantic parts of the plot are fleeting, contrived, frustrated, impotent and unproductive. That is the feeling that Huxley is trying to elicit.
A second part of the plot is of a recovering Cubist painter. Huxley's painter is bored by the woman who looks after him. He is unsatisfied by popular painters of the time who have no nature in their paintings. Its all flat squares and primary colors. In recovery, Huxley's painter creates realistic horses and people. The lay critics at the manor think he has lost his mind and know he has lost the avant-garde.
The rediscovery of nature is something that other characters do--in the garden, with the moon, during interrupted romantic moments. This (seemingly transcendental) return to nature is one of the paths available to mankind after the industrial hell of WWI. The Cubist representation of this catastrophe is Picasso's "Guernica" (1937)--with natural figures like horses, cows and humans (all being annihilated by violence). Some other paths discussed in the book are positive eugenics (Malthusianism) on a rural estate and/or a return to industrial London and await the next imperial conflict. Denis got back on the train to London. He didn't even understand how it happened--it seemed predestined. But there were other paths.
Huxley is not known as an existential master but he was a late contemporary of the most famous of that movement. British people aren't known for producing this genre of writers--especially when compared to France, Germany and Russia. But the following quote, from a character, Mr. Scogan, who meditatively paces and smokes late at night, is as good as Camus or Dostoevsky:
"Worried about the cosmos, eh?...I know the feeling...It's a most distressing symptom. 'What's the point of it all? All is vanity. What's the good of continuing to function if one's doomed to be snuffed out at last along with everything else?' Yes, yes. I know exactly how you feel. It's most distressing if one allows oneself to be distressed. But then why allow oneself to be distressed? After all, we all know that there's no ultimate point. But what difference does that make?" (Huxley 293).
Huxley isn't really an existentialist any more than he is a cubist or eugenicist. He uses these concepts to critique interwar modernity. From his historical perspective, from the decade book-ended by Crome Yellow and Brave New World, modernity had destroyed Europe, killed tons of people and was turning toward fascism to maintain order. Everybody who wrote during this period had to respond to this turn. The best--Bradbury, Orwell and Huxley--created the paradigmatic lens through which all westerners were introduced to the modern implications of surveillance, nationalism and reproduction. This was the modern framework built upon the Progressive Era milieu of eugenics, existentialism and cubism (only palatable in abstraction or proof of concept) punctuated by the unimaginable violence of WWI. This isn't the cosmos fault. It is humans that are distressing.
sources:
Aldous Huxley Crome Yellow New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922.